Yes, SEO still works – here’s proof

I mentioned yesterday that many of our clients come to us fixated on Google search traffic. That’s a special kind of myopia that can ruin your marketing strategy, but since you asked … you know who you are 🙂 … today we’ll look at the organic traffic growth for a couple of our clients.

Are these “typical”? Well, frankly, there is no “typical.” There are so many different sorts of search results and so many specialized algorithms to create them, that every business will have a unique set of challenges in growing organic search. For example, local businesses are faced with maps; travel businesses compete directly with Google; and almost any site can get scraped and cut out of search to serve the so-called “knowledge graph.”

This first client runs an information website monetized by affiliate offers. Notice the sharp turn-around in September of last year.
As of March, his year-over-year organic only traffic is up 54.8% and the only online marketing being done for this site is our content marketing service. If you take the low point in 2015, his traffic is up 168%! So does content work? Sure seems like it.

This next client runs a lead generation business in a travel niche and his year-over-year traffic increase for March is 109%.

And notice how quickly it happened? There’s a really interesting story here. We started his service in April 2015 and saw some steady growth until the end of summer when everything just stalled and started going the wrong way. We tried several things without any real effect until November when the client discovered that his blog had been hacked! It took him a month of concerted effort to fix and then his traffic just exploded.

As of March, his revenue is up by more than 20% compared to the same time last year.

We don’t generally focus on traffic growth because you can’t buy groceries with just traffic. You have to convert that traffic to money and this is always the focus we have in working with clients.

For both of the clients above, their new traffic resulted in new money, and all of it from free sources. The charts show only the organic search uplift, but there was increase in social and direct as well.

Content marketing is the only SEO left that is both safe and effective, so either do content yourself or have us do it.

And we’ll even make you a special deal if you come onboard in the next few days..

Pay for your first two months of service and we’ll give you your 3rd month for free. That’s a 33% discount.

(1) This offer is honestly a marketing experiment. We ran it once before with, I think, mixed results, so depending on how it goes this time, it might be the last time.

(2) Bringing on a new client involves senior staff. They are few in number and pretty expensive, so this offer is available to ONLY the first 6 new clients that signup before midnight on May 1, 2016. After that, the experiment ends and you might never see it again.